By Sarah Vander Schaaff I fell asleep twenty years ago and awoke to find that numbers are added together in a whole new way. It’s called partial sum addition and if you’re the parent of a seven-year-old you might know what I’m talking about. Some schools send home a study guide or handbook to help parents help their grade school kids. Mine did not or if they did I missed it among the forms. It was only after a parent-teacher conference in November that I realized how different everything was, not only with addition but also with subtraction. “We don’t borrow from the ten’s anymore,” the teacher explained, “because you don’t ever really give it back, do you?” No, you… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Well, maybe not last summer, but summers long ago. As many of us begin to think about what our own kids will be doing this summer, I decided to ask my colleagues about summers they still remember. Was there an experience that shaped them? As a kid, of course, there was always something wonderful about having nothing to do except finding a friend and some ice cream, or a new bike route to a crowded pool. And was I the only one who considered “The Price is Right” a good break from the heat outside? But when it comes to memories of formative experiences, television, as you might expect, does not make the cut. Instead, for… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff I was amazed to read that Stanford’s six Massively Open On-line Courses, or MOOC’s, reached over 300,000 people. But it wasn’t until last week that I realized the MOOC, or a future incarnation of it, would most likely be part of my daughters’ experiences, even if they weren’t pursuing something in the field of Computer Science in college. I remember when a new thing called the “Ethernet” was going to be installed in my college dorm room. But as many have said, MOOC’s not only expand knowledge, they can cut down the cost of it, an idea no parent can completely scoff at unless spending more than $300,000 for a four year private college education in… Read More

The first time I heard of an IQ test for children was in grade school. A newspaper article said the actress Geena Davis had such a high one and that she was in Mensa. It’s interesting that these tests are often talked about in the context of trivia, or as a friend recently said, in a hushed tone of secrecy. When it comes to understanding how one’s own child learns, however, these tests can be essential, practical, and also confusing. I’ve turned to a few people here at Mindprint for a simple introduction to the IQ test for children. We focused on one question. What does an IQ test for children have to do with education? Clinical child psychologist, Wendy Matthews starts us… Read More